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Make Your Own Games
Recommended for years 4-8
These activities can be used to guide students through brainstorming and creating their own games. Students are encouraged to flex their design-thinking muscles in a fun and educational way.
Activity 1: Play some games!
Students will need:
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Games workbook
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Games to play
Activity 2: What is a game?
Students will need:
Encourage students to identify what games have in common; for example: points, a winner, competition, negotiation, high scores, recalling knowledge, solving puzzles etc. Ask students to compare games and toys – how are they similar, and how exactly are they different?
A game could be defined as: a physical or mental competition conducted according to rules with the participants in direct opposition to each other
A toy could be defined as: an object for a child to play with, typically a model or miniature replica of something.
Using this knowledge, ask them to come up with an answer to the question: What is a game?
Encourage students to play as many games as they can. Their aim in playing these games is to find out what they enjoy/do not enjoy about the games. Ask them to record their findings in their games workbook.
Activity 3: Plan your game
Students will need:
Step 1: Plan your game
Students are going to plan their games. The games workbook has some guideline questions for the students to fill in which will help to focus their ideas. Encourage students to think deeply about these questions – they can use the answers to the guideline questions to refer to when making their games.
Step 2: Map out your game
Get students to use the space in their games workbook to ‘map out’ their games. If any students have chosen to make a digital game, it would be beneficial for them to add any code they think they could use to this ‘map’ of their game. Encourage students to be as detailed as possible – they can and should revisit this part of the process many times. They could share their ‘maps’ with classmates and ask for feedback if they are able to.
Students can copy and paste/print multiples of the pages if they wish to.
Activity 3 and 4: Make your game prototype and test! Then test some more
Students will need:
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Games workbook
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The prototype of their game
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Other people to play your game (as well as the creator)
Get students to make their prototypes and test them out with as many people as possible. They can use the games workbook to record any feedback they get from their users (those who test their game). Teachers could offer to play the game as well, so students get feedback from many different people.
Ask students to record how they will make changes to improve their game (they do not have to listen to ALL feedback – they could pick one or two things to change to start with). Encourage students to keep testing and getting feedback (and recording this) until they are happy with the ‘final’ product.
Activity 6: Evaluation
Students will need:
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Games workbook
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Their game (and feedback)
Ask students to look at the criteria they made for their game from their workbook (from Activity 3: Planning your game, Step 1, box 5 of the table). Encourage students to decide how successful they have been and relate it back to their original criteria by answering the following questions:
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How would you change what you do next time?
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What worked well?
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What did not work well?
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Did you ask for feedback from the right people?
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Would there be people more appropriate to ask in the future? If so, who and why?
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What advice would you give to someone else about to take on this ‘make your own game’ challenge?
Curriculum links:
Technology Level 3
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Technological products: Understand the relationship between the materials used and their performance properties in technological products.
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Planning for practice: Undertake planning to identify the key stages and resources required to develop an outcome. Revisit planning to include reviews of progress and identify implications for subsequent decision making.
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Brief development: Describe the nature of an intended outcome, explaining how it addresses the need or opportunity. Describe the key attributes that enable development and evaluation of an outcome.
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Outcome development and evaluation: Investigate a context to develop ideas for potential outcomes. Trial and evaluate these against key attributes to select and develop an outcome to address the need or opportunity. Evaluate this outcome against the key attributes and how it addresses the need or opportunity.
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Optional: Computational thinking for digital technologies: Progress outcome 2 In authentic contexts and taking account of end-users, students give, follow and debug simple algorithms in computerised and non-computerised contexts. They use these algorithms to create simple programs involving outputs and sequencing (putting instructions one after the other) in age-appropriate programming environments.
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